Trump removes JCS and DNI from National Security Council

General Flynn never met with President Obama, it seemed quite strange to find out the DIA and the President never once met. Trump has significant more executive experience than his predecessor and appears to have created a team of advisors that are not all in lockstep with one another, so I am not concerned that groupthink will be an issue. No doubt there is a pecking order, but in agreement with the previous poster - Do you think General Mathis is going to simply allow himself to be ignored?

It appeared that the previous POTUS' primary advisor was a lady with little to no practical experience - where was your outrage then?

Trump promised to rattle Washington - he is. I think there are more than enough committees, boards, advisors etc that changing who is on one or disbanding another isn't as significant a threat to national security as you make it out to be.

I do agree it is shameful that for the second time in modern history, the main political parties ran a Presidential and VP candidate with no military experience or background.

He has been POTUS for about 10 days - let's see what the real impact is before screaming the sky is falling.
 
Capri120 said:
Not taking either side of this debate, but thought I would provide a link to a fairly comprehensive "paper" about the federal advisory council known as the NSC.

As I read this thread, I wanted to know more about what the NSC is, was, intended to be, and its history, since the topic of this thread seems to be eliciting such "horror". The attached document, I felt, was impartially informative; a stark contrast to what we see in the news media.

I thought it was quite interesting to see that the NSC has changed and evolved many times, since its inception in 1947, concerning statutory and non-statutory members, responsibilities, etc. based on each president's want or need and current US and global state of affairs.

Just a heads up, the paper is 40 pages long.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL30840.pdf
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After reading Best's Organizational Assessment, the following salient observations stood out to me:

Evaluation. Most of the criticism of the Nixon NSC centered on the role played by Kissinger. His position in a number of the key committees gave him control over virtually the entire NSC apparatus, leading to charges that the system, for all its efficiency, now suffered from over centralization, and later from domination by one man. (p. 13)

****************

Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s first National Security Adviser, argues that the NSC staff

should be made up of as many career officials as possible, with as much carryover between administrations as can be managed. Its experts should be good (but not necessarily gray) bureaucrats who know how to get things done and how to fight for their views, and who are serving the national interest more than the political interests of their President.

He cautioned that:

a political appointee whose main credential is work on national security issues in political campaigns will have learned to think about national security issues in a partisan context. The effect of his or her advice is likely to be to lengthen the period of time during which a President, at the outset of a term, tries to make policy on the basis of campaign rhetoric rather than international reality. (p. 25)

**************

One historian has summed up the role of the National Security Adviser:

The entire national security system must have confidence that the [National Security Adviser] will present alternate views fairly and will not take advantage of propinquity in the coordination of papers and positions. He must be able to present bad news to the president and to sniff out and squelch misbehavior before it becomes a problem. He must be scrupulously honest in presenting presidential decisions and in monitoring the implementation process. Perhaps most important, he must impart the same sense of ethical behavior to the Staff he leads. (p. 30)
 
Cerberi said:
General Flynn never met with President Obama, it seemed quite strange to find out the DIA and the President never once met. Trump has significant more executive experience than his predecessor and appears to have created a team of advisors that are not all in lockstep with one another, so I am not concerned that groupthink will be an issue. No doubt there is a pecking order, but in agreement with the previous poster - Do you think General Mathis is going to simply allow himself to be ignored?

It appeared that the previous POTUS' primary advisor was a lady with little to no practical experience - where was your outrage then?

Trump promised to rattle Washington - he is. I think there are more than enough committees, boards, advisors etc that changing who is on one or disbanding another isn't as significant a threat to national security as you make it out to be.

I do agree it is shameful that for the second time in modern history, the main political parties ran a Presidential and VP candidate with no military experience or background.

He has been POTUS for about 10 days - let's see what the real impact is before screaming the sky is falling.
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Your comment belies a certain lack of understanding of the NSC. Certainly not just "another board or committee" though it can seem that way from afar.

His name is Mattis, though that was likely a typo. Flynn was fired in disgrace. DIA is NOT the DNI. Trump has "executive experience" that includes four corporate bankruptcies. Let's not pretend the government is a business or that Trump is an exceptional executive. He took a fortune and made it bigger. Sadly, he isn't the real problem. Bannon is. Obama's advisor didn't worm her way onto the NSC.

If you haven't seen enough from Trump's administration in 10 days to make you doubt its collective competency, then nothing will convince you.

A man who rose to prominence spreading lies is now on the NSC because his friend put him there. Think about that. That should scare you.
 
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Cerberi said:
It appeared that the previous POTUS' primary advisor was a lady with little to no practical experience - where was your outrage then?
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If you're talking about Susan Rice, she was Assistant Secretary of State and US Ambassador to the United Nations.
 
scoutpilot said:
The issue is that by removing them from the Principals Committee (where Obama had them with the "shall" language) the NSC is now free to meet without any input from the CJCS or the DNI (not much useful historical context for DNI as it's a post-9/11 creation atop the IC).

The former executive of a fake news site now gets to be the biggest voice in POTUS' ear about how your children are employed as a tool of the republic. I hope Trump voters on this site feel a bit of that metallic twinge of fear on their tongues.

If not, read a bit more about Bannon...
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but SECDEF is still on the principals committee. And the CoC flows from the President through SECDEF to the Combatant Commanders, not through the CJCS. Is Mattis, so recently out of uniform, not essentially the president's military advisor and SECDEF rolled into one? The DNI or CIA removal, if true (an important caveat at this point), would be more concerning.

About Bannon, I see former military officer, investment banker, MA in National Security from Georgetown, MBA from Harvard (w honors no less). What makes him any less qualified or more ideological than someone like Susan Rice or Valerie Jarrett? Yes, Jarrett never sat on the NSC to my knowledge, but she certainly wielded immense power on decisions made by POTUS on national security. Where is this definitive account that outs him as a "Nazi" as Susan Rice alleges.

And for that matter, what supports your assertion that Bannon will be the biggest voice in the President's ear about national security? Will he outweigh Tillerson/Mattis/Flynn? How do you know this?

It seems your antipathy towards Bannon on the NSC is more ideological than factual.
 
I was referring to Valerie Jarrett who appeared to be Obama's primary advisor on all issues.

Susan Rice was happy to lie about many matters and having a previous title didn't necessarily make her qualified in the role she filled.

Again, give the guy a chance, I would argue many Presidents have sought advice both from inside and outside the official titles one may have. Whatever US foreign policy has been for the past 2 decades has not been a screaming success. I am all for reviewing who/how decisions get made and who has the ear of the POTUS.
 
I also do not see where Bannon will have "the biggest voice in POTUS' ear" about our children.

I look at the current appointment list related to military/defense/security decisions, the majority having served our country as warriors already:

Secretary of Defense - General "Maddog" Mattis
Deputy Secretary of Defense - Robert Work
Secretary of the Navy - Philip Bilden
Secretary of the Army - Vincent Viola
Secretary of the Air Force - Heather Wilson
National Security Advisor - Lt General Flynn
Deputy National Security Advisor - K.T. McFarland
Executive Secretary of the National Security Council - Lt General Kellogg
Secretary of Homeland Security - General John Kelly

I feel my DD is in good hands under these leaders and their voices to the President's ears.
 
I'm more concerned that Rick Perry, if confirmed as Secretary of Energy, will be on the NSC.
 
Sledge said:
It seems your antipathy towards Bannon on the NSC is more ideological than factual.
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Not speaking for @scoutpilot, but I for one have huge ideological differences with Bannon, given that I'm neither a Leninist, a white nationalist nor a misogynist. Having ideological differences with someone does not preclude those differences from being factual.
 
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Jcc123 said:
Not speaking for @scoutpilot, but I for one have huge ideological differences with Bannon, given that I'm neither a Leninist, a white nationalist nor a misogynist. Having ideological differences with someone does not preclude those differences from being factual.
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I couldn't have said it better. Oh, Steve Bannon went to Harvard? Well then...never mind his career made telling the world that the last POTUS was a socialist muslim born in Kenya. My goodness, he has a pedigree!

Bannon is both closer and more regarded by Trump than any of those appointees listed above. Because NSC meetings are typically long and detailed, most expect that Trump will not attend many. That means that the "output" of the meeting will be carried by, and filtered through, his most trusted advisor.
 
Jcc123 said:
Not speaking for @scoutpilot, but I for one have huge ideological differences with Bannon, given that I'm neither a Leninist, a white nationalist nor a misogynist. Having ideological differences with someone does not preclude those differences from being factual.
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Bannon's quote about being a Leninist is not a statement of his ideology. Marxism was the ideology. Leninism was the "praxis". That is, Leninism was the practical implementation of Marxism in Russia. Given that Russia did not have the developed "material conditions" for revolution, the proletariat would need to be lead by a "revolutionary vanguard". Lenin and Trotsky wrote the playbook. If he has an MA from GU, I'm sure they covered it.

Bannon's political playbook has much in common with that of Lenin and Trotsky. The most obvious is that the term "Bolshevik" derives from the Russian word for majority. The Bolsehviks labelled the larger faction of the Russian Social Democrats, "Mensheviks", derived from the word for minority. Sound familiar? Inauguration crowds, voter fraud, popular vote ? The inauguration speech was less Lincoln: "With malice towards none, with charity for all..." and more Lenin: "Each man must choose between joining our side or the other side."

Bannon is not the only member of the Trump Administration to speak of what they're attempting to do as "revolutionary". The President and his minions can't keep speaking metaphorically about blowing up the system or admonishing us to watch "what we do not what we say", without some push back. Breitbart News' raison d'etre was to blow up the system and serve as "a platform for the alt-right" (Bannon's words). The President can have anyone he damn well pleases advising him. I don't think even @scoutpilot would deny him that.

In this case, however, the President has broadcast to the world and the National Security apparatus that the DNI and CJCS are less important to his national security policy formulation than the care and feeding of his "movement".
 
Reports from Trump aides now indicate he was unaware Bannon had been elevated to the NSC. He doesn't read the orders he signs. Bannon is our actual national executive.
 
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